Bring Her Back
Director: Danny Philippou, Michael Philippou
Starring: Billy Barratt, Sally Hawkins, Mischa Heywood
Genre: Shocking horror
Even if an Australian film has excellent acting and direction, shows highly impressive, realistic special effects, holds your attention and gets your blood pumping, that doesn’t mean it’s good or makes any sense.
Bring Her Back is a great example of this. It’s a horror film. According to the Neil Chase film review website, there are 17 horror subgenres. I’ve categorised Bring Her Back as Body Horror and Splatter Horror because the film features lots of bodies that get splattered. Now that’s probably enough to explain what the film is all about. And if that’s a thing that you don’t mind watching then I highly recommend it to you.
If that’s the case, then I suspect you will also claim that horror films are only about scaring the audience. But there are plenty of examples of great horror films where intense, meaningful storylines are actually the focus. Psycho (1960), The Shining (1980), Alien films 1-3 (1979-1992), The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and The Sixth Sense (1999) are great examples, though curiously, all are decades old. This begs the question, has the nature of films changed or the nature of young audiences?
So, if you like your film to have a meaningful storyline, such as where supposed insightful cult videos logically explain why someone was killed, and it is clear why chewing one person sometimes transfers a personality and sometimes just seems delicious, then give Bring Her Back a miss.
Rating: Two-and-a-half living corpses
